The present invention relates generally to the field of distributed computing systems, and more particularly to command processing in such systems.
There are many computer applications whose execution requires large scale physical and virtual computing resources in a distributed computing environment. Some such applications, including, for example, massive multi-player online games (“MMO games”, or simply, “MMOs”), include event-driven simulations. Such simulations may be implemented using simulation cycles. In a given cycle of an MMO game, for example, player commands initiated on a client node (for example, on a game console connected to the distributed computing environment) are executed, an updated game state is determined, and the updated game state is sent back to the players. The simulation may appear as occurring in real-time based on each simulation cycle lasting about 20 ms and producing a refresh rate of about 50-60 HZ.
Scaling existing simulations to millions of users in MMO games presents a long-felt but unmet need to maintain the illusion of real-time player experience, while maintaining a reasonable amount of computing resources in light of bandwidth limitations.